How to Metaverse and Why
The metaverse. Is it here? Where? How might a brand get there, and why go now?
When Facebook changed its name to Meta, experts on the ‘verse were still struggling to agree on a single definition of what it was. A year or so later, we have an understanding of the key tenets: The metaverse can include virtual or augmented-reality technology; it spans multiple platforms in the virtual and physical worlds; it exists in real-time and persists even when one isn’t playing; and finally, it’s based on a digital economy where users can create, buy, and sell goods.
You could be forgiven for feeling that’s still a pretty broad definition. In fact, if you’re thinking about the smartest strategy for your brand, you might reasonably ask why it’s essential to adopt metaverse technologies now when their infrastructure is still relatively underdeveloped. Cogs & Marvel is an agency that deals with all things experiential and branding, our clients range from tech innovators, to robotics engineers, to retail platforms, but all of them are confronting this question.
In reckoning with 'how to metaverse and why,' we found that the fashion industry provided a good case study. Several years ago, spectators were tossing around comments about the virtual world being the future of fashion. Then, in 2021, Gucci made a foray into the metaverse with the launch of Gucci Gardens, a game hosted on the gaming platform Roblox that mirrored the house’s 100th-anniversary fashion show, Florence. It gave Roblox users the opportunity to explore the Garden’s immersive, themed rooms, to try on and purchase digital Gucci goods that could be worn inside the game.
More high-end houses quickly followed suit and by 2022, metaverse fashion was no longer a game of the elite. Fast-retailer Forever21 launched into cyberspace by becoming part of the fashion district in Decentraland, a 3D-world, browser-based platform. Mattel’s Barbie received her own line in the metaverse. High-street chain Zara unveiled a dynamic partnership with Zepeto, a South Korean chat app where users interact as avatars in different worlds, and Louis Vuitton’s 'Louis the Game' reached two million downloads.
This dynamism reflects in the $9.5 million seed round funding for SYKY (pronounced 'psyche'), a virtual fashion platform founded in 2022 by Irishwoman Alice Delahunt. Investment was led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six VC firm, and participant Brevan Howard Digital said of their involvement, “There is a cultural shift underway. What you wear digitally is just as meaningful as what you wear physically, and the two will soon be connected, opening new monetisation opportunities enabled by Web3.” The financial forecasters concur: Morgan Stanley recently projected that the virtual fashion market will be worth over $55 billion by 2030; Technavio has predicted that between 2022 and 2027, virtual reality in the gaming market will increase by $17.9 million.
“The public knows the metaverse is the future, and clients want to do something with it, but we’re still in the education and discovery phase,” says Miriam Verdon, Cogs & Marvel’s head of digital solutions. Much of the digital experimentation and evolution still occurs in the gaming world. This is true even for fashion. By selling character 'skins' for virtual tokens, Epic Games’ Fortnite has generated more than $9 billion in annual revenue. That’s significantly more than any fashion house has achieved in virtual clothing sales. But with mainstream culture increasingly interested in the gaming space, brands need to be positioned to engage audiences there. As a recent McKinsey Quarterly article put it: “The metaverse represents an opportunity to engage consumers in entirely new ways while pushing internal capabilities and brand innovation in new directions.”
“Right now, the metaverse element needs to be an experience someone can have at an event. A brand shouldn’t presume their audience is familiar with the metaverse, they should be using events to introduce the technology by creating content that lives at the brand experience. Afterwards, you make it available online, and it lives there forever so people can access it and return to it. Conceptually, that’s how you bridge the gap.”
This was the basis for a strategy Cogs & Marvel experimented with for our Meta project CTO Connect. We sent out VR headsets to attendees and invited them to experience the future: conferences held in the metaverse. Such gatherings aren’t far off - once again, the gaming world has been ahead of this curve for years. Says Miriam, “It’s about how we bring the experience of a game beyond the tech world, to somewhere like the luxury car industry. We can have people actually sitting in the next Lamborghini, behind the wheel, driving the car. Our clients can add a huge ‘wow factor’ with activations that are still accessible.”
Fashion has come a long way since the 2001 film Zoolander in which Hansel, the second-greatest-ever male model, smashed a boxy iMac hoping to find physical photos “In the computer.” In a few short years, who knows? We could all be wearing clothes made of smoke and practicing our magnum face in a virtual multiverse. If your brand wants in on the action, now is the time to start exploring the metaverse.
